Links

David Sackler Pleads His Case on the Opioid Epidemic - by Bethany McLean (LINK)

The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be ($) [H/T @BrentBeshore] (LINK)

Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think [H/T @morganhousel] (LINK)

The Appeal of 21st Century Stoicism (LINK)

Related book: How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius

On Crypto and Its Implications for American Technology Innovation (LINK)

Editor’s Note: This testimony was delivered by a16z managing partner (and former chairman of the board of the National Venture Capital Association) Scott Kupor to the House Agriculture Committee as part of their public hearings on “Cryptocurrencies: Oversight of New Assets in the Digital Age” in July 2018. 

Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky Demystifies Depression, Which, Like Diabetes, Is Rooted in Biology (2009 video) (LINK)

Revisionist History Podcast: Puzzle Rush (LINK)

Stuff You Should Know Podcast: What happened to the Neanderthals? (LINK)

Narlugas Are Real - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

The Lies We Tell (LINK)

Greenhaven Road Capital's Q1 Letter (LINK)

Horizon Kinetics Q1 Commentary (LINK)

How Schwab Ate Wall Street ($) (LINK)

Do Ride-Sharing Customers Sit in Front? - by Howard Schilit (LINK)

Near-record inventories pinch dealers [H/T @DRuizG80] (LINK)

The Acquirers Podcast: Marvel’s Hidden Assets: Joseph Calandro Jr. chats to Tobias Carlisle on the Acquirers Podcast (LINK)

Related paper: M&A deal-making: Disney, Marvel and the value of “hidden assets”

The Peter Attia Drive (podcast): Robert Sapolsky, Ph.D.: The pervasive effect of stress - is it killing you? (LINK)

Related books: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst; Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

Related previous link: Robert Sapolsky on The Ezra Klein Show

MIT Self-Driving Cars: State of the Art (video) [H/T Linc] (LINK)

On Monks and Email - by Cal Newport (LINK)

The Uncomfortable Truth - by Mark Manson (LINK)

Related book: Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

The near misses of scientific history - by Matt Ridley (LINK)

Related book: Unravelling the Double Helix

Mysterious Rings Around Reefs Have No Simple Explanation - Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

"We don't consider ourselves good macro-forecasters (or even people who believe in forecasting).  So we certainly are in no position to say when the recession or market pullback will start, how bad it will be...or even that there definitely will be one.  But we think we're unlikely to be proved wrong if we say cyclicality is not at an end but rather is endemic to all markets, and that every up leg will be followed by a down leg." --Howard Marks (November 1996)

Billions to Bust: Lessons from the failure of some of India's biggest business names [H/T @Sanjay__Bakshi] (LINK)

A great review of the book The Myth of Capitalism (LINK)

The Biggest Returns - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

The Stay Rich Portfolio (or, How to Add 2% Yield to Your Savings Account) - by Meb Faber (LINK)

Not All Marketplaces are Created Equal: Tales of a Marketplace Founder [H/T @eugenewei] (LINK)

Fire in Venezuela - by Peter Zeihan (Part 1, Part 2)

BIS: Claudio Borio’s interview with Capital on debt (LINK)

The Skift Podcast: Megatrends Defining Travel in 2019 (LINK)

American Innovations Podcast: Rubber | Rubber Dreams | 1 (LINK)

In a world where materials were limited to wood, leather, metal, and cloth, rubber was something new: a substance that was strong, soft, flexible, and waterproof—but completely undependable. Then along came a 33 year-old hardware merchant named Charles Goodyear, who made it his personal mission to conquer rubber at any cost.

The Ezra Klein Show: Robert Sapolsky on the toxic intersection of poverty and stress (podcast) (LINK)

Related books: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst; Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

The Tim Ferriss Show: Susan Cain — How to Overcome Fear and Embrace Creativity (podcast) (LINK)

Related book: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

After Living Abroad, Kids Struggle With American Overparenting [H/T @paulg] (LINK)

We may finally know what causes Alzheimer’s – and how to stop it [H/T @paulg] (LINK)

Royal Astronomer Martin Rees' Long Now talk (video) (LINK)

TED Talk: What sticky sea creatures can teach us about making glue | Jonathan Wilker (LINK)

Why Whales, Seals, and Penguins Like Their Food Cold - by Ed Yong (LINK)

No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Book of the day: The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

***

For Audible Members, the current sale has some great titles included. The sale ends January 27th, and here are some of the names that stood out to me:

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

Living with a SEAL

Never Split the Difference

Mindset

Deep Work

So Good They Can't Ignore You

Origin Story

Cosmos

Stuff Matters

Stress and Your Body

Your Best Brain: The Science of Brain Improvement

John Quincy Adams

Man's Search for Meaning

Meditations

Links

“Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.” --Bruce Lee [H/T Latticework]

Jeff Bezos: ‘We will have to leave this planet … and it’s going to make this planet better’ [H/T @MarceloPLima] (LINK)

Atul Gawande's commencement address at U.C.L.A. Medical School: Curiosity and What Equality Really Means (LINK)

Saving As Many Lives As Penicillin - Dr. Atul Gawande & Malcolm Gladwell (video) [From October of last year, but not sure I had previously seen this one.] (LINK)

Mohnish Pabrai's latest appearance on ET Now (video) (LINK)

The Psychology of Money - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

“Proprietary Product Distribution” is Better than Sliced Bread - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

De Beers to Sell Diamonds Made in a Lab (LINK)

Your Next Glass of Wine Might Be a Fake—and You'll Love It (LINK)

Worried About Big Tech? Chinese Giants Make America’s Look Tame (LINK)

In Conversation: Netflix' Ted Sarandos and Marc Andreessen (video) (LINK)

Why Your Brain Hates Other People (And how to make it think differently.) (LINK)

The Myth of 'Learning Styles' [H/T @AdamMGrant, who summarizes in his Tweet: "Your learning style is about how you like to learn, not how you learn best. Although you might enjoy listening, reading, or doing, there's no evidence that you learn better that way. We all learn through a combo of auditory, visual, and kinesthetic modes."] (LINK)

Links

The Thrill of Uncertainty - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Dan Pink speaks with Brett McKay about his new book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (podcast) [H/T Abnormal Returns] (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: Episode 136 — It’s All 1s and 0s (LINK)

a16z Podcast: Revisiting the Gene (LINK)

Robert Sapolsky speaks to CBC Radio Quirks & Quarks (LINK)

Related book: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst 

Brain Cells Share Information Using a Gene that Came From Viruses - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Animals Have Culture, Too - by Ed Yong (video) (LINK)

The mysterious cycles of ice ages - by Matt Ridley (LINK)

Some great thoughts on network effects from Anu Hariharan on Twitter:

• Often misunderstood - Network Effects is not the same as scale

• One simple way to test for that is ask this question - what is the “barrier to exit” for the user?

• If the barrier to exit for the user is low, then there is no network effect. This implies it is easy for users to switch from your service

• Ride sharing services (Uber, Lyft) don’t have a network effect (in other words demand side economies of scale). Users often switch apps if it takes longer than 5 mins ETA or if there is surge pricing on one

• However ride sharing does have supply side economies of scale and therefore opportunity for select players to have monopolistic share in a market

• On the other hand apps like Facebook, LinkedIn have very strong network effect - because the barrier to exit for the user is really high!

• A user has invested time and effort in building a social graph on these platforms with connections, history of exchanges and in some cases even maintain them. It is not easy for customers/ users to switch easily and therefore the “barrier to exit” for the user is really high

Links

Asking the Right Questions (LINK)

The smaller the company and the more illiquid its currency, the more the investment process becomes an art and less of a science. Just like with any art form, whether it’s music, acting, painting, etc it just takes a lot of time and experience to do it well. The art of investing in small companies is evaluating management teams. If you don’t believe that management is important when investing in small companies like microcaps, just wait a little longer. You will.

The Generalized Specialist: How Shakespeare, Da Vinci, and Kepler Excelled (LINK)

The Rot That Lies Beneath Some Index Funds - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

Investors Playing ETF Rout Pushed Junk Bonds to Brink of Chaos [H/T Rick Bookstaber] (LINK)

Camouflage and dope in a Bull Market - by Sanjay Bakshi (LINK)

Kyle Bass predicts investors are getting ready to pour billions back into Greek economy (LINK)

Stitch Fix and the Senate - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Robert Sapolsky Explains How Religious Beliefs Reduce Stress (article and video) (LINK)

Links

"My perspective...is that we’re really not surprised nearly often enough, because one of the things that really happens, as soon as an event occurs, we have a story. That’s automatic, that System 1 generates stories. It looks for causes, it looks for stories, and it generates its tentative stories that, if endorsed by System 2, become beliefs and opinions. But the speed at which we find explanations for things that happened makes it difficult for us to learn the deep truth. And the deep truth is that the world is much more uncertain than we feel it is. We see a version of the world that is...a lot simpler and a lot more certain than the world really is." - Daniel Kahneman (Source)

How to Remember What You Read (LINK)

Our Biggest Economic, Social, and Political Issue The Two Economies: The Top 40% and the Bottom 60% - by Ray Dalio (LINK)

A Dozen Lessons from Megan Quinn about a Growth Mindset - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

Richard Bookstaber on WealthTrack (video) [H/T Will] (LINK)

Eddie Lampert and ESL's response to The Globe and Mail article about Sears Canada (LINK)

What Mongolian Nomads Teach Us About the Digital Future - by Kevin Kelly (LINK)

Why Facebook Shouldn't Be Allowed to Buy thb - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Tim O’Reilly: ‘Generosity is the thing that is at the beginning of prosperity’ (LINK)

Related book: WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

EconTalk (podcast): Jennifer Burns on Ayn Rand and the Goddess of the Market (LINK)

Related book: Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right

Jonathan Haidt talks with Krista Tippett (LINK)

Jocko Willink guest hosts The Tim Ferriss Show, and discusses his book Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual (podcast) (LINK)

7 Lessons from the New Paleo (LINK)

Art De Vany's keynote and panel sessions at Paleo f(x) (LINK)

Robert Sapolsky’s Behave is a tour de force of science writing (LINK)

Links

The FPA Crescent Fund's Q2 Commentary and Webcast are available.

One of the World’s Widest Moats - by John Huber (LINK) [John's presentation pairs nicely with the Naspers/Tencent arbitrage discussed in the FPA Crescent Commentary above.]

A Conversation with Naval Ravikant about blockchains (video) (LINK)

Robert Sapolsky on the Waking Up podcast discussing his book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (LINK) [As Michael Mauboussin‏ tweeted earlier this week: "Just finished 'Behave' by the brilliant Robert Sapolsky. The best book I have ever read on human behavior. Sapolsky is an amazing teacher."]

Robert E. Lee opposed Confederate monuments (LINK)

How to be a Stoic, in practice - by Massimo Pigliucci (LINK)

Why did single cells start to cooperate? (LINK)

What Scientists Have Learned from Eclipses (video) (LINK)

Today's Audible Daily Deal ($2.95) is a short Neil deGrasse Tyson course from The Great Courses: My Favorite Universe

Links

Released today: How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life – by Massimo Pigliucci

The Zurich Project podcast: James Ferguson on GEM's Approach to Selecting Managers (LINK)

Will Thorndike on the Invest Like the Best podcast (LINK)

Related book: The Outsiders

Sohn Conference New York Notes 2017: Ackman, Einhorn, Meister & More (LINK)

The Local News Business Model - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

What To Do When You Fail in China (Pt 2): Ford vs. Fiat - by Jeffrey Towson (LINK)

How Beauty Evolves - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Related book (also released today): The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - and Us - by Richard O. Prum

Every Episode of David Attenborough’s Life Series, Ranked - by Ed Yong (LINK)

TED Talk - Robert Sapolsky: The biology of our best and worst selves (LINK)

Related book: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Links

Why United (and all of Big Air) is resistant to disruption despite an offering that sucks - by Sangeet Paul Choudary (LINK)

I’ve had several discussions with logistics and transportation execs over the last month and have repeatedly seen how much the industry depends on network effects to drive supply side economies of scale. The very factors that make platforms work are already at work in these industries.  

In my latest article, I use the lens of networks and platforms to look at how the airline industry favours a winner-takes-most dynamic by building supply side economies of scale. There are important lessons here for those building platforms to exploit demand side economies of scale, as well as for pipeline companies that operate global supply chains and are digitizing them. 

There are important lessons here for understanding asset-heavy businesses. We often tend to dismiss asset-heavy businesses saying asset-light ones will disrupt them. That is lazy thinking. If anything, Amazon is so successful not just because it’s a data company but also because it is asset-intensive on the supply side to the point of leasing access to those assets out as a service, first through AWS, then through Fulfilment by Amazon, and now with logistics. As pipelines move towards platforms, we will see more of the Amazon model than the Facebook or Google or Uber model. Pipelines won’t reject assets. They will, instead, complement their asset intensity with data network effects and utilize these assets better. 

Think Different and Better - by Ian Cassel (LINK)

Invest Like the Best podcast: The Bet with Buffett – Hedge Funds vs. The S&P 500, w/ Ted Seides (LINK)

The Absolute Return Letter, May 2017: Investment Rules (LINK)

Mutual Fund Observer, May 2017 (LINK)

Seneca on Grief and the Key to Resilience in the Face of Loss: An Extraordinary Letter to His Mother (LINK)

Robert Sapolsky Explains Human Behavior (LINK)

Related book (released today): Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst - by Robert M. Sapolsky [Book review HERE.]

Declassified nuclear weapon test footage is scientifically fascinating and existentially terrifying (LINK)

Links

Business Blunder: Pancake Flipper Al Lapin Jr. & International Industries (IHOP) (LINK)

IP Capital (Brazil) with a discussion on Amazon in its Q3 report (LINK)

The Absolute Return Letter, December 2016 (LINK)

Michael Hudson and Steve Keen discussing macro (Real Vision TV transcript) (LINK)

Macro Voices podcast -- Art Berman: OPEC Production Cut, Crude Oil Outlook (LINK)

An interesting podcast worth checking out: The Distance [H/T Aaron] (LINK)

The Distance is a podcast by Basecamp about longevity in business, featuring the stories of businesses that have endured for at least 25 years and the people who got them there.

Freakonomics Radio (podcast) -- Bad Medicine, Part 1: The Story of 98.6 (LINK)

We tend to think of medicine as a science, but for most of human history it has been scientific-ish at best. In the first episode of a three-part series, we look at the grotesque mistakes produced by centuries of trial-and-error, and ask whether the new era of evidence-based medicine is the solution.

Brain Pickings -- Genes and the Holy G: Siddhartha Mukherjee on the Dark Cultural History of IQ and Why We Can’t Measure Intelligence (LINK)

Related book: The Gene: An Intimate History

It’s Personal: Five Scientists on the Heroes Who Changed Their Lives (LINK)

World's Largest Cluster of Sinkholes Discovered (LINK)

Seneca on Cato: the best quotes (LINK)

Links

What Ben Franklin Could Teach Us About Civility and Politics [H/T @rationalwalk] (LINK)

Related books: 1) A Benjamin Franklin Reader; 2) Benjamin Franklin: An American Life - By Walter Isaacson; 3) Benjamin Franklin - By Carl Van Doren (a little longer than Isaacson's biography)

John Malone on CNBC (Video 1, Video 2)

a16z Podcast: What’s Next for Technology and National Security? (LINK)

To Understand Facebook, Study Capgras Syndrome  - by Robert Sapolsky [H/T The Browser] (LINK)

Book of the day (which I've seen several fund managers recommend over the last few weeks): Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

Links

DaVita HealthCare Partners (DVA): An Intelligent Fanatic Led Turn Around (LINK)

Unilever Buys Dollar Shave Club for $1 Billion (LINK)

Dollar Shave Club: How Michael Dubin Created A Massively Successful Company and Re-Defined CPG [H/T @iancassel] (LINK)

Dollar Shave Club and The Disruption of Everything -  by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Patrick O'Shaughnessy's Full Recommended Reading List (LINK)

TOXO - A 2009 Conversation with Robert Sapolsky (video and transcript) (LINK)

Related book: Life: The Leading Edge of Evolutionary Biology, Genetics, Anthropology, and Environmental Science

Book of the day: Digital Vortex: How Today's Market Leaders Can Beat Disruptive Competitors at Their Own Game

Links

Innovation Ecosystem Podcast: IE011 Larry Cunningham – Of Berkshire, Moats and Culture (LINK)

Related books:  

The Buffett Essays Symposium: A 20th Anniversary Annotated Transcript

Berkshire Beyond Buffett

Could You Work at a Place Where Everyone Gets to See Everything and People Always Tell You What They Really Think? Ray Dalio Believes You Should (LINK)

The road to confetti - by James Grant (LINK)

Bill Miller Nabs Valeant Shares, Spying Opportunity Where Others See Chaos - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

Chobani CEO Announces Plans to Give All of His Employees a Stake in the Company (LINK)

Antitrust and Aggregation - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Inside “Emojigeddon”: The Fight Over The Future Of The Unicode Consortium [H/T @benthompson] (LINK)

James Altucher Podcast: Ep. 164 – Steve Case: The Third Wave is coming (LINK)

Related book: The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur's Vision of the Future

FT Alphachat Podcat discusses what happened when Argentina defaulted on $80bn of its bonds in 2001 [And touches on the most recent issues as well.] (LINK)

Related book: And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out) Wall Street, the IMF, and the Bankrupting of Argentina

A Leak Wounded This Company. Fighting the Feds Finished It Off (LINK)

Origin Stories Podcast - Episode 08: Being Human with Robert Sapolsky (audio) (LINK)

Related previous post:  Robert Sapolsky interview with Nautilus

Related books: 

A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons 

Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

Chimpanzee fig selection sheds light on primate motor skills evolution (LINK)

The young chimpanzees that play with dolls (video) (LINK)

John Wooden: Values, Victory and Peace of Mind (video) [H/T David] (LINK)

Links

The Audible Daily Deal is a good one today. It's a Great Courses lecture series from Robert Sapolsky (for $2.95): Being Human: Life Lessons from the Frontiers of Science

Why do Family-Controlled Public Companies Outperform? The Value of Disciplined Governance [H/T @ChrisMayerAgora] (LINK)

George Cooper talks about his book, Money, Blood and Revolution (video) (LINK)

Austbrokers faces major buffeting [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Corporate disasters usually stem from many small problems conspiring to cause one very big one. A dip in sales, distracted management, a little too much debt; for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. 

Austbrokers, however, is threatened by the opposite principle: one enormous problem that will cause many more. Warren Buffett wants to put the company out of business.

Video Captures Catlike Creature (a Genet) Riding Rare Rhino (LINK)

Links

Jeremy Grantham's Favorite Book (LINK)

Related book: The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth

Deal Tips From Buffett and Berkshire’s Other Managers (LINK)

Related book: Berkshire Beyond Buffett: The Enduring Value of Values

Cognitive Constraints on Valuing Annuities [H/T @jasonzweigwsj] (LINK)

This paper investigates consumers' difficulty in valuing life annuities. Using a survey-based experiment, we show that the prices at which people are willing to buy annuities are substantially below the prices at which they are willing to sell them. This finding is not a simple endowment effect, because it prevails even when the annuity and lump-sum option are both presented as deviations from their own endowments. We also find that buy values are negatively correlated with sell values, as those individuals who express the highest sell values tend to also express the lowest buy values. This sell-buy valuation spread is negatively correlated with cognition; that is, the spread is larger for those with less education, weaker numerical abilities, and lower levels of financial literacy. Our evidence contribute to the emerging literature on heterogeneity in financial decision-making abilities. Importantly, it implies that many people lack the cognitive skills required to manage their retirement asset decumulation decisions optimally.

Paul Graham: The Fatal Pinch (LINK)

Scott Adams: The Human Mind (LINK)

Robert Sapolsky Explains the Biological Basis of Religiosity, and What It Shares in Common with OCD, Schizophrenia & Epilepsy (LINK)

Book of the day: Pay Attention to the Thin Cow

Links

Atul Gawande on Charlie Rose discussing his latest book, Being Mortal (LINK)

Talks at Google: Steve J. Martin discussing the book The small BIG: small changes that spark big influence (video) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Benedict Evans: Mobile Is Eating the World (LINK)

Frank Martin's latest: Why 1925? [H/T Santangel's Review] (LINK)

Jim Grant on Bloomberg (video) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Andrew Smithers: Fiscal stimulus – is it just a sugar rush? (LINK)

Buffett Pal Gottesman Says Don’t Expect Another Berkshire [H/T Will] (LINK)

Related book: Berkshire Beyond Buffett

Are You Sacrificing Your Health? (LINK)

Related book: The Primal Blueprint

Robert Sapolsky: Given chimps’ murderous tendencies, are we doomed to be violent? (LINK)

Related books (Sapolsky): A Primate's Memoir, Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals

Related recent post: Robert Sapolsky interview with Nautilus

Links

Broyhill on valuation, market cycles, and more (LINK)

Supply and Demand: Untangling the Market’s Greatest Mystery (LINK)

Jason Zweig: The Rise of Ultracheap Financial Advisers (LINK)

Bloomberg, Dalio Discuss Business Strategies (video) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies, and Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates LP, talk about their business strategies and careers. Bloomberg's Stephanie Ruhle moderates the discussion at the Bloomberg Markets Most Influential Summit in New York. Bloomberg is also majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, and former mayor of New York City.

Puerto Rico Pours On Tax Incentives For Investors [This is an older article, but Mohnish Pabrai mentioned at his annual meeting this weekend that he's setting up his insurance acquisition and investment vehicle, Dhandho Holdings, in Puerto Rico, largely because it will only have to pay 4% tax on investment income, so I thought it might be worth looking into.] (LINK)

Thomas Pritzker: multifaceted Hyatt chairman (LINK)

A Dozen Things Learned from Henry Ellenbogen (LINK)

Tim Harford: Crushing the competition – at any price (LINK)

Related book: The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Tim Harford: How to see into the future (LINK)

Related book: The Undercover Economist Strikes Back

60 Minutes started its new season last night (LINK)

Scott Pelley reports from the front lines in the fight against ISIS in northern Iraq, and con artists have been filing bogus tax returns and collecting millions. Steve Kroft finds out how far the scam has gone and why the IRS hasn't been able to stop it.

Robert Sapolsky: Dude, Where’s My Frontal Cortex? (LINK)

Related previous post: Robert Sapolsky interview with Nautilus

The Brain That Changes Itself (LINK)

Related book: The Brain That Changes Itself

Hussman Weekly Market Comment: The Ponzi Economy (LINK)

The central point is this. The U.S. economy has shifted course from one of productive capital accumulation to a reliance on continuous expansion of debt in excess of the economic ability to repay it. Call this the Ponzi Economy. 

The U.S. Ponzi Economy is one where domestic workers are underemployed and consume beyond their means; household and government debt make up the shortfall; corporate profits expand to a record share of GDP as revenues are sustained by household and government deficits; local employment is replaced by outsourced goods and labor; companies refrain from productive investment, accumulate the debt of other companies and issue new debt of their own, primarily to repurchase their own shares at escalating valuations; our trading partners (particularly China and Japan) become our largest creditors and accumulate trillions of dollars of claims that can effectively be traded for U.S. property and future output; Fed policy encourages the yield-seeking diversion of scarce savings toward speculation in risky securities; and as with every Ponzi scheme, everyone is happy as long as nobody seeks to be repaid.

Links

Coursera Course: Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects [H/T csinvesting] (LINK)

Related book: A Mind For Numbers

Amazon Takes Shopping Offline With a New Mobile Credit Card Reader (LINK)

Larry Robbins Focusing on Companies Deploying Capital (LINK)

Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky Demystifies Depression (LINK)

Here's How Maria Popova of Brain Pickings Writes (LINK)

Jane Goodall Answers the Proust Questionnaire (LINK)

How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall? Talent

Link to article: How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall? Talent

The 8-year-old juggling a soccer ball and the 48-year-old jogging by, with Japanese lessons ringing from her earbuds, have something fundamental in common: At some level, both are wondering whether their investment of time and effort is worth it.

How good can I get? How much time will it take? Is it possible I’m a natural at this (for once)? What’s the percentage in this, exactly?

Scientists have long argued over the relative contributions of practice and native talent to the development of elite performance. This debate swings back and forth every century, it seems, but a paper in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science illustrates where the discussion now stands and hints — more tantalizingly, for people who just want to do their best — at where the research will go next.

The value-of-practice debate has reached a stalemate. In a landmark 1993 study of musicians, a research team led by K. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist now at Florida State University, found that practice time explained almost all the difference (about 80 percent) between elite performers and committed amateurs. The finding rippled quickly through the popular culture, perhaps most visibly as the apparent inspiration for the “10,000-hour rule” in Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling “Outliers” — a rough average of the amount of practice time required for expert performance.

The new paper, the most comprehensive review of relevant research to date, comes to a different conclusion. Compiling results from 88 studies across a wide range of skills, it estimates that practice time explains about 20 percent to 25 percent of the difference in performance in music, sports and games like chess. In academics, the number is much lower — 4 percent — in part because it’s hard to assess the effect of previous knowledge, the authors wrote.

“We found that, yes, practice is important, and of course it’s absolutely necessary to achieve expertise,” said Zach Hambrick, a psychologist at Michigan State University and a co-author of the paper, with Brooke Macnamara, now at Case Western Reserve University, and Frederick Oswald of Rice University. “But it’s not as important as many people have been saying” compared to inborn gifts.

One of those people, Dr. Ericsson, had by last week already written his critique of the new review. He points out that the paper uses a definition of practice that includes a variety of related activities, including playing music or sports for fun or playing in a group.

But his own studies focused on what he calls deliberate practice: one-on-one lessons in which an instructor pushes a student continually, gives immediate feedback and focuses on weak spots.

“If you throw all these kinds of practice into one big soup, of course you are going to reduce the effect of deliberate practice,” he said in a telephone interview.

.................

Related books:

Outliers: The Story of Success

The Talent Code

Talent is Overrated

The Sports Gene

The Success Equation

Related links:

Malcolm Gladwell: COMPLEXITY AND THE TEN-THOUSAND-HOUR RULE

Dan Coyle and David Epstein on the Bryan Callen show

Related excerpt from the recent Robert Sapolsky interview I posted:

What I’ve been thinking might actually be going on is that adolescence is something unavoidable that emerges not because it’s so cool and adaptive, but because the adaptive thing is wait a long, long time before you have fully wired up your frontal cortex. Why might that be the case? Alright, so we’re born with our genome, the combination of your mother and father’s genes, that wind up in that first fertilized egg and that’s it. That’s your genetic legacy. Every cell in your body is destined to have that exact same genome. That turns out not to be true in all sorts of interesting ways, but what that also means is that when you’re thinking about what genes have to do with the brain behavior, by definition critically, if the frontal cortex is the last part of the brain to develop it’s the part of the brain least shaped by genes, and most sculpted by the environment and experience. And I think basically the only way you can have a species that is as complex and socially resilient and socially context dependent and all those amazing things we do, the only way you can pull that off is to have a frontal cortex whose development just bears the imprint of everything you experienced along the way—in effect, that’s been freed from whatever extent the genes are deterministic, which is not very. I think ironically what the evolution of the frontal cortex has been about is genetic evolution to free it as much as possible from the straight jacket of genes.